Printshops convert printing orders, also known as print jobs, into finished printed material. Conventional methods have required the submission of a print job to a printshop where a store employee provides an estimated price and time of delivery based on the type and size of the work order. Conventional methods have stressed the breaking of the print job down into component parts with the processing of each part of the print job occurring only following the completion of the previous part of the print job.
Recent developments in the field of printing have seen emerging standards for printshop independent job description languages (PSDL). These PSDL file formats allow the specification of a job in a printshop independent manner with the details of the job, such as operations to be performed, resources required, and the actual data content of the job, included in the file. One of these PSDL formats, PPF (Print Production Format), was developed by the CIP3 consortium, the International Cooperation for Integration of Prepress, Press and Postpress to provide a data packet that can be read by any CIP3 compliant vendor. Other examples of PSDL formats are the JDF, and PCX file formats. Once received by the printshop, the print job must be extracted from the PSDL file and a plan for work generated (work flow).